


Its About Jumping

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-22
Updated: 2005-12-22
Packaged: 2019-01-19 07:01:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12405396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: “Was there no safety? No learning by heart the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air?”�





	1. Prelude: James

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

James is ten years old. He’s tall and a little bit too skinny, with horn-rimmed glasses and a big, ready smile. He hates his very untidy black hair and thinks his nose is too long; he hopes his mother is right when she says he is a very handsome young man who is simply going through an awkward stage. He likes taking pictures with his grandpa’s old 35mm and playing quidditch in the big apple orchard behind his house. Sometimes he stops and throws rocks up at the branches, just so he can watch the blossoms shake loose and float to the ground, pink and weightless, like cotton candy rain. He took a picture of it once, and sent it to his grandpa for Christmas. Now it hangs in a fancy glass frame above his fireplace.

 

James is a Potter, which means he has a whole lot of family, and a whole lot of money. His mother owns a bookstore in Diagon Alley called ‘The Dusty Cover’, and his father is head of the Auror department at the Ministry of Magic. His father is, consequently, a very busy man and, consequently, never home very much. 

 

As a result, James spent most of his childhood in his mother’s bookshop, exploring the sunlit aisles and musty storage rooms, making castles and towers and bridges of books, marching little paper figures up and down the moldy spines. When he got older, he started to read the books instead, sitting for hours in the little room above the shop, looking out the window above the bed and watching the people pass below. Sometimes he made up stories about them as they scurried through the winding streets, small as ants (he would close one eye, hold his hand against the glass and squint down at them, fit them perfectly in the space between index finger and thumb, so easily crushed beneath his giant fingers).

 

Today, James’s father is not at work. Today, the three of them are gathered awkwardly around Platform 9 ¾, which is busy and bustling. Today, James is going away to Hogwarts. 

 

His father, a very tall man with clear blue eyes and short cut salt and pepper hair (short cut to hide the genetic untidy-ness which he found abominable), stood erectly, looking around him with a slight frown on his face. James had always been slightly intimidated by his father who, besides being nearly four heads taller than him, was a rather strict, no-nonsense type of man who read the paper every morning with his coffee, which he drank black, and who he’d never seen step out of the house in anything less than a suit and tie. He adjusted it now, a solid blue one that brought out his remarkable eyes, as he looked around, brooding.

 

James’s mother on the other hand, stood beaming at everyone who passed, stopping this only to shout out greetings or coo over a passing baby in her pram. She was a wispy sort of woman with straw blonde hair and dark green eyes. James thought she was beautiful, and sometimes traced the wrinkles at the corner of her eyes, to tease her. He thought they looked like chicken tracks. Mrs. Potter liked to laugh more than anything, detested coffee and newspapers, and enjoyed reading under the apple trees in summer, when James would fly around and shake the blossoms loose. She would turn her face up and smile as they fell down around her, pink and weightless, cotton candy rain. James had taken a picture of that, once, too. He kept it on his bedside table and it made him feel safe.

 

Now, James shifted his feet, which were at the moment too big for his body, and looked around him. His fingers itched on the shutter of his camera (he was very rarely seen without it). Off to the side of the platform a group of older kids laughed raucously. A blonde haired boy chased after a loose kitten. Somewhere, the baby in her pram began to wail. He looked down at his shadow on the cobblestones, the tall looming figures of his parents stretched out on either side of him like pillars. He snapped a picture. The train whistle blew, startling him. He looked around at where the steam had begun to billow from massive scarlet smokestacks. He took a picture of that too.

 

“That’s the five minute mark,”� Said his father in a grim voice. He pulled out a gold-plated pocket watch and examined it. His clear blue eyes met James’s hazel ones (more blue today, since he was wearing the prim navy sweater his aunt had sent him, a congratulations present) and he smiled slightly. “Ready to go?”�

 

“Yeah, I guess.”� James replied. He let his camera hang from the strap around his neck, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and looked down at his feet. There was a spot on his new shoes already.

 

“You guess?”� Mrs. Potter repeated lightly. She smiled reassuringly at him.

 

“You haven’t forgotten anything, have you?”� Mr. Potter asked, sounding stern.

 

James shook his head and looked around behind him. People were loading the train in babbling trickles.??

“I should go,”� He said, and looked back at them. His mother wrapped him in a hug. She smelled like breakfast and bath soap, he thought.

 

“Please be good,”� She pleaded, pulling away and smoothing his hair. “and remember to write. I love you, darling.”�

 

“You too, mum.”� He smiled at her, and turned to his father, opening his mouth to speak and shutting it again directly. Without warning, his father had unhooked the glinting chain of his gold-plated pocket watch and held it out for him to take.

 

“I never want to hear of you being late to class, understand?”� He placed it in his son’s outstretched palm and folded his fingers tightly over it. It was warm and heavy in his hand. He smiled up at him and his father’s handsome face, lined with creases and scars, lightened a bit.

 

James opened his palm and looked at the watch a moment. He tucked it carefully into his pocket and gathered the handle of his trolley.

 

“Goodbye.”� 

 

He walked steadily away from them, the trolley banging noisily behind him. Before boarding the train he looked around; his parents stood watching him with their arms around each other. When his mother lifted a hand to wave frantically, he realized she was crying. James raised the camera and focused the pair of them perfectly in the lens. Once he’d snapped the picture he hauled his trunk up and slid it on board the train. He didn’t look back again.


	2. Prelude: Sirius

Two aisles and three compartments down, Sirius Black watched this scene from the window with a frown. He vaguely recognized the family from somewhere- had they been to one of mother’s dinner parties? He liked the woman and her big smile- the man looked like a grouch. But he’d given him the pocket watch, so Sirius supposed the man must love his son very much. That, he thought, was admirable enough. The boy with the camera seemed a bit of an oddity. Sirius figured he was one of those do-gooder types, what with the sweater and all- being eleven years old, Sirius was a man of infinite wisdom and _never_ wrong about these types of things.

 

Besides being a man of infinite wisdom, Sirius was something of a troublemaker. He had been proudly stuffing toads in his mum’s slippers and switching the salt and sugar shakers since the age of three. Now that he was quite grown-up and off to school, he figured it was about time his mischief evolved and matured- he looked forward to forging new alliances and causing as much havoc as humanly possible now that he had access to magic and a castle full of potential victims. He was, consequently, quite wary of do-gooder’s.

 

Sirius is a very handsome young man, and is perfectly aware of it. He’s got piercing gray eyes and long black eyelashes, which he supposed he got from his father, smooth dark hair and nice straight teeth, which he supposed he got from his grandfather, and a strong nose with a bump in it, which he supposed he got from his mother, who was probably the least attractive person in his gene pool. He didn’t like his mother very much, since she was old and sour and yelled too much. He didn’t like his father very much either, because when he wasn’t busy completely ignoring his two sons he was busy beating the Black family honor into them, literally rather than figuratively, sadly enough. Come to think of it, Sirius didn’t like any of his family very much. He very rarely let this bother him. He couldn’t see why he should spend all his time moping about when there was so much fun to be had.

 

Sirius liked astronomy. He spent hours researching the stars in the Black family library, and even longer up on the roofs watching the planet alignment through a fancy glass telescope. He liked the idea of buried treasure and sometimes burrowed through crates in the attic, hoping he’d find something extraordinary. He found an opal necklace in a glass case once, but wasn’t allowed to touch it. In fact, he was forbidden from going back up there ever again. That did little to stop him, of course.

 

Now, Sirius looked down at the carpet as the compartment floor began to tremble. The engines roared- scenery began to crawl past the window. He paid this no mind, and was busy making up very exciting stories involving the dodgy stain just beneath his feet when the door slid open.

 

The first word that pops into his head is _green_ , probably because the girl standing just inside the doorway had the largest, brightest green eyes he had ever seen. He was sure, in fact, that she had somehow enchanted them that color. Being a man of infinite wisdom, Sirius knew that this particular shade of green (cat-eye green, he thinks) is not something regular people are just _born_ with.

 

The girl blinks her cat eyes at him, and then looks down at the carpet beneath his feet. He watches the way her peculiarly long eyelashes flick downward like auburn butterflies (the same color as her hair, thick and wavy and scrunched into a bouncy ponytail at the top of her head) and he thinks that she must know some very advanced cosmetic charms, because regular people just aren’t born that _vivid._

 

“There must have been a murder in here.”� She declares, and her voice is as small as the rest of her. But small and quiet are two very different things, Sirius knows, because he can already tell she is not a quiet person. “See there-,”� She pointed matter-of-factly at the stain beneath his feet. “Definitely a murder. Probably a head wound. You can tell by the direction of the blood.”�

 

“Blood?”� Sirius looked disbelievingly at her. “It’s a pumpkin juice stain.”�

 

“I suppose it could be,”� she blinked her butterfly lashes at him and squinted back down at the carpet. “but I’d much rather it be blood. Anything else sounds dreadfully boring.”�

 

Sirius was quite impressed with this response, which was probably because he felt exactly the same way.

 

“Who are you?”� He asked. It was a rather rude way of making friends, but Sirius was not much in the practice of being polite. This didn’t faze the girl at all, however, for she had turned away from him, and was busy tracing her tiny fingers over the faded vandalism scribbled on the storage bunks. He had to repeat it again before he could gain her attention.

 

“Oh- Lily.”� She declared indifferently, her large eyes staring intently at the words inscribed just above his head. Feeling distinctly annoyed by her lack of attention, Sirius shifted in his seat to get a glimpse at the inscription. 

 

_“Was there no safety?”�_   It read, in large loopy scribbles, _“No learning by heart the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air?”�_

__

Sirius stared at the hastily scrawled note and tried to make sense of it. It sounded like a quote from a book he’d forgotten, like a well-written piece of advice about the world that he couldn’t seem to grasp. The fact that he didn’t understand frustrated him- for he was a man of infinite knowledge, and had been assured of his vast intelligence by several pompous old tutors since he was five years old, all of which certainly _must_ have known what they were talking about. They _must_ have known, he thought.

 

He looked up at the girl, Lily, and tried to understand the expression on her face- she looked as if she had just discovered a marvelous secret. Their eyes met.

 

“It’s about jumping.”� She said, and then she smiled. It was the smile that got him, or it was the words she spoke next, or it was the lips that the words came out of, because for the first time in his life Sirius noticed human beings _had_ lips, and for the first time in his life he noticed just how _appealing_ they could be. “When it comes to being alive each day, that’s pretty much all we can do, don’t you think?”� 

 

Sirius blinked at her several times, feeling like he had just looked straight into a camera flash, straight into the sun. Though Lily herself wasn’t aware of it, she had a peculiar way of drawing these sorts of reactions from people. There was something about the way she worded things, perhaps; there was something in her eyes. Sirius thought about this, he contemplated the girl in front of him and he tried to figure out what it was he was feeling. He thought of _dazzled_ , and that, he rationalized, was a fair enough word to use when you can’t tell the floor from the ceiling and all you can hear is the thump-thump-thump of all the blood in your body rushing straight to your head.


End file.
